Neil deGrasse Tyson and the Startalk folks have an interesting discussion with David Krakauer.
One thing that jumped out to me is the idea that consciousness is the ability to sense the exterior world, This leads to the realization that all matter is the universe senses that gravitational influence of every other particle in the universe and that goes down a very long rabbit hole.
Also, do you know how to use a sextant, a slide rule, an abacus? Are you dumber if you don’t? What happens when we move away from understanding why things work and just depend on the output of the work?
Review research paper citation trails. Identify valid citations, circular citations , pulled citations, invalid citations. Rank the citations by popularity.
Run all programs through LLMs looking for malicious coding, instructions to export data to remote sites, anything associated with known bad actors, and bad coding.
Use LLMs to review router traffic going to or from suspect IP addresses.
Maintain a list of suspect IP Addresses. Block them as close to the source as possible.
Maintain a list of DoS (botnet) IP addresses and block them at gateway routers. Block them at my router if nothing else.
Run existing programs through LLMs to optimize coding and to document the code.
Run Programs through LLMs to identify, and possibly correct, bad programming such as buffer overflows, uncleared buffers and other hack-able openings.
Run all new programs through LLMs to ensure they follow ‘good’ programming protocols.
I was listening to a recent Science Friday podcast about the human genome and came to the realization that our genome is basically a LLM, with lots of redundant words and blank pages. This explains so much, the slips, the gaffs, the spacing out, the hallucinations; we are AI!
I was looking at my calendar and noticed that the Winter Solstice is coming up Dec 21. Then I noticed that the time of sunset on the solstice is not the earliest amongst the days nearby. And the time of sunrise is not the latest. Indeed, looking over the various sunrise and sunset times, it turns out that the earliest sunset was in the period of December 3-10 – 16:37 in Colorado Springs – and the latest sunrise occurs from December 31 – January 10 – 7:18. But the Solstice is still the shortest day, longest night of the year. (9:26, 14:34 hrs). Most peculiar, one would intuitively think that the shortest day would have the latest sunrise and the earliest sunset. Something was wrong and I needed to find out. So I went to Google.
I hadn’t realized how insidious these trackers have become. This WSJ article discusses how cookies have grown since their Netscape days. There is also a link to a tool that tells you who has what installed on a domain site, about half way down the article.
Is there advertising on web pages? I should probably pay more attention and be less oblivious.
Elaine posted a link on how to use leftover Netflix flaps and I surprised her 5 minutes later with this:
Netflix Tray Origami
I have a few extra flaps laying around.
I also wanted to show off my new monitor, a Samsung 943BWX. It has a 16:10 aspect ration and you can rotate the screen so you get a profile instead landscape presentation. Very neat. As you can see on the screen, I was able to get the equivalent of two screens of the origami instructions at one time.
Elaine was rather surprised at how easy it was to configure the X11 file to rotate the display and to have it actually work.
Note to self- don’t use a black-sided flap for the origami if you are going to take a picture of it.
